If you were a backpacker wandering the streets of Phnom Pehn in 1991 men on motorcycles would ride up to you and say "killing, killing". They were offering a trip to the killing fields, a mass grave outside of the capital with tens of thousands of skeleton parts.
There are actually many killing fields in Cambodia, scores, possibly hundreds, all around the country but this was the main one. Eventually I took someone up on the offer. He was a teenager who still wore his Khmer Rouge bandana tucked under his collar, this fact I noticed only after accepting the ride. As we drove across the palm studded landscape buzzing with mosquitoes I felt an overwhelming sense of dread and sorrow... I had just visited the grade which school converted into a processing center where thousands of victims had been photographed before being led here. The UN was running the country now, and the school/prison was now a museum, but the faces of the dead were still with me as we bounced along the road.
The main killing fields are not much to look at.. Just rice paddies littered with dirty clothes and the occasional bone. A new temple had been built nearby and bit by bit the Cambodians were stacking thousands of skulls and categorizing them by age, sex and race. Many had crude holes near the frontal lobe. Even more chilling than the skulls were the teeth that littered the pathways out to the paddies and the little man who told me (while smiling) how he had to kill his family in order to stay alive. But when I remember this day, I do not think of the fields or the skulls or even the man, I think of the palms, those silent witnesses to horror beyond words.
4 comments
Very sad...
lovely photo - very nice perspective.
If you were a backpacker wandering the streets of Phnom Pehn in 1991 men on motorcycles would ride up to you and say "killing, killing". They were offering a trip to the killing fields, a mass grave outside of the capital with tens of thousands of skeleton parts.
There are actually many killing fields in Cambodia, scores, possibly hundreds, all around the country but this was the main one. Eventually I took someone up on the offer. He was a teenager who still wore his Khmer Rouge bandana tucked under his collar, this fact I noticed only after accepting the ride. As we drove across the palm studded landscape buzzing with mosquitoes I felt an overwhelming sense of dread and sorrow... I had just visited the grade which school converted into a processing center where thousands of victims had been photographed before being led here. The UN was running the country now, and the school/prison was now a museum, but the faces of the dead were still with me as we bounced along the road.
The main killing fields are not much to look at.. Just rice paddies littered with dirty clothes and the occasional bone. A new temple had been built nearby and bit by bit the Cambodians were stacking thousands of skulls and categorizing them by age, sex and race. Many had crude holes near the frontal lobe. Even more chilling than the skulls were the teeth that littered the pathways out to the paddies and the little man who told me (while smiling) how he had to kill his family in order to stay alive. But when I remember this day, I do not think of the fields or the skulls or even the man, I think of the palms, those silent witnesses to horror beyond words.
wow a really chilling story to the picture,i'd love to visit mexico,sounds and looks like a fantastic place?
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